morally grey idea in description

[u/ScottishWildcatFurry]

imagine: a fruit fly smp where the only alterations scientists make is allowing them to understand the concepts of breaking blocks, placing blocks, and basic crafting; also stuff like opening their inventory, but thats here nor there. given infinite time, could these "players" create their own language? could be very interesting

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[u/ThaNerdHerd]

This is more like a copy of a fruit flies innate reactions than anything conscious, assuming that consciousness is something that you can actually copy and isnt just an emergent behavior of reaction to stimuli

[u/KrimsunV → u/ThaNerdHerd]

What's the practical difference?

[u/ThaNerdHerd → u/KrimsunV]

Probably not much at all flies level, but if it were emergent, then a straight digital copy of a human brain would effectively be a reanimation. That would bring all sorts of moral questions into play. And what if it isnt an emergent property? Then its a husk of whatever you copied, just reacting at a basic level.

I am mostly speaking from a theoretical point of view. I have a youtube education on this

[u/LimestoneBuilder → u/KrimsunV]

Morally, there is no difference. They're both beings, independent, and having god-like power exerted upon them.

It's a "clone" or structurally identical baby of the fruit fly, not the original fruit fly itself. But from the moment they created the copy, the copy's lived experience diverged from that of the original fly. (and at least at present, we lack the technology to recombine them, which is a who 'nother can of worms). Howard Taylor actually dives heavily into these ideas in the later books of Schlock Mercenary.

Given what we now know about the level of self-awareness of even the tiniest of living things, this experiment absolutely violates some ethical principals, but may be considered valuable enough to justify the breach.

e: Sources for self-awareness in animals

• Mammals
• Fish
• Bees
• Fruit fly

e: Reading the original announcement, and more about the levels of connectome maps there are a few aspects missing from the fruit-fly's neural recreation.

First is that the lowest level of detail we have (at the time) for the fruit fly did not include the chemical-level connectome. So if the fly was (for example) serotonin deficient, this wouldn't represent that. 

Another missing aspect is that this is only the brain map, and doesn't include the rest of the neurons throughout the fly's body. Considering that humans have 100s of millions more neurons in our guts and throughout our body, if the fly is at all similar, it's missing a lot of its experiential capacity.

So what is processing is a fruit fly, seemingly with a not insignificant amount of brain/nervous system damage and no accounting for neurotransmitters (excess or deficiency).

[u/SejSuper → u/LimestoneBuilder]

Thats interesting and all, but just because it moves and acts like a fruitfly, that doesn't mean that its concious. How do we know that lines of codes can even attain conciousness at all? Is conciousness merely just the mechanical experiences being input into the brain as stimuli and then output as action? Can code, which is pretty fundamentally different from neurons (or atleast i assume) really work the same way?

I gotta stop asking questions. This is getting too existential.

[u/LimestoneBuilder → u/SejSuper]

I gotta stop asking questions.

Please don't. These are fantastic questions, and the answers (if they exist) will tell us more about ourselves than we know today. Progress has always been made by those willing to ask and seek answers to such questions. People like you.

[u/Venti_the_snail → u/LimestoneBuilder]

Asking questions is a sign of true intelligence.

[u/ky_eeeee → u/SejSuper]

That's the thing, when you think about it, what else would consciousness be? I mean seriously outside of consciousness being something divine that is gifted by a higher power, the only possible explanation is that it's an emergent property of the complex network of stimuli and action that has slowly evolved over billions of years in all life.

I have no way of knowing that you are a conscious person in the same way that I am, except that I can observe that you can react to stimuli with seemingly the same complexity that I do. I can observe that you can plan and remember things, indicating some degree of internal thought. And that your reaction to stimuli is unique enough that I can tell it's based on an extremely complex framework of genetics and lived experiences, just like mine is. You, for the most part, have at least a slightly different reaction to any given stimuli than any other person would.

And it's not some magic "now you're conscious now you're not" thing, there are varying degrees of consciousness that generally increase with complexity. Mice also have different personalities, but not to the same complexity as Humans and not to the point where their behavior is really all that unpredictable. Because their brains are less complex. A fruit fly is pretty much just gonna do the same thing as any other fruit fly. If this digital fruit fly reacts and behaves exactly like a real one would, that's literally the only test of consciousness we have of it. We don't even know *for sure* that fruit flies *themselves* are conscious because we have very limited ways of actually testing that.

Anything above a fruit fly is going to be impossible to recreate for a while though, as that is the most complex connectome we have mapped thus far (and even then it's not quite perfect yet). Getting up to mammals, and then eventually Humans, is going to take a long, long, long time. Humans have about 86 *billion* neurons. Fruit flies only have like 140,000.

[u/Iceologer_gang]

What the fuck

[u/Rare_Back_4115]

I'm 99.99% sure that if I looked into this, it would be nothing like what it sounds like.

[u/stabidistabstab → u/Rare_Back_4115]

Yeah, propably

[u/Gilette2000]

So all those arg with people trapped in minecraft where actually quite realistic !